Deutsche Bank Leases U.K. Headquarters From Land Securities

(Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Bank AG signed an agreement with Land Securities Group to move its U.K. headquarters to a building being constructed at 21 Moorfields in the City of London financial district.

The lender will lease at least 469,000 square feet (43,570 square meters) of the 564,000 square-foot building for 25 years if planning approval is secured, Land Securities said in a filing on Tuesday. The property is equivalent in size to about 10 soccer fields and is expected to be completed in November 2021. A spokeswoman for Land Securities declined to comment on how much rent Deutsche Bank will pay.

Germany's biggest bank, which employs 7,000 people in 16 buildings across London, is committing to keeping staff in the city despite the Brexit vote and a reorganization within the lender itself. Deutsche Bank may shift about 300 billion euros ($354 billion) from the balance sheet of its U.K. entity to Frankfurt as client trading and assets migrate to the continent following Britain's decision to leave the European Union, a person familiar with the matter said in July.

“We see this as a clear positive for the City,” Osmaan Malik, head of pan-European property research at UBS Group AG, said in a note to clients. He said the building will house “around 5,000 employees.”

A spokesman for Deutsche Bank declined to comment on the number of employees who will move to the new building.

Deutsche Bank already leases the Zig Zag building in Victoria from Land Securities for its asset-management unit. The new headquarters is located directly above London's Moorgate underground station and will have access to Crossrail, a new railway network that will connect London with Heathrow and Reading in the west, and Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east, when it's fully completed, which is scheduled for the end of 2019.

Corporate demand for office space in the capital has fallen in the wake of the Brexit vote, with BNP Paribas SA estimating that firms leased 19 percent less space in central London in 2016 than a year earlier. Deutsche Bank, which is in the process of overhauling its businesses, said in March that the next phase of its plan will cause additional job losses. In 2015, it predicted that 9,000 jobs would be eliminated through 2018.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sharon Smyth in London at ssmyth2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Neil Callanan at ncallanan@bloomberg.net, Christian Baumgaertel, Andrew Blackman